Locality Switch

Governments have a tendency to make things much harder than they have to be. Take, for example. social media. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Even a kid with elementary computer skills can understand how to post something to YouTube, a Blog, or Facebook. Why do our politicians get it so wrong?

Bureaucracy.

Let’s look at the short lived blog of Senator Conroy’s: The short lived Digital Economy blog. It looked and smelt like a government website, and got so many things wrong.

How about the Twitter account of my local Mayor, Councillor Larry Bolitho. The tweets are written in third person, each one starting with “Larry Bolitho”, and proceeding to tell us where he is. There aren’t any personal thoughts in there. Oh, and have you seen the instruction manual and disclaimer which comes with it?

Responses will be at the discretion of the Mayor… Who@HillsShireMayor chooses to follow on Twitter is at the discretion of the Mayor.

It would be great if our politicians could get with it on this whole social media thing. Some of their present attempts are just embarrassing.

However, there is someone who is up to date on this whole social media arena. Barack Obama. Have you seen the Whitehouse website? It’s beautiful, functional, accessable, and also integrates with social media platforms.

Anil Dash wrote a blog post about Government internet startups. He notes that they are now actually doing things right:

Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.

It’s great to see what the Government of the United States of America is turning out, in terms of websites and useful web tools. They are being innovative, and are truly leading the way in government web presences. Countries around the world should use this as the benchmark, and strive to meet it.

Let’s hope the rest of the world can see the benefits of social media and the web, and start doing things properly. It can work to their advantage.